This invention relates to a birthing bed and particularly the invention relates to a labor grip for a birthing bed.
During the birth of the baby, it is important for the mother to assume a comfortable attitude while at the same time assisting, through the exertion of abdominal muscle contraction, the thrusting of the baby out of her vagina. To this end, birthing beds have been provided with a handle on each side of the bed in a position that it can be gripped by the mother to assist her in creating maximum thrust. Such handles conventionally have a fixed position as, for example, depending from the forward end of the bed side guard.
The fixed single position handles suffer the disadvantage that they cannot comfortably be reached by different sizes and shapes of mothers.
It has been an objective of the present invention to provide a handle that provides multiple hand positions so as to provide mothers of different sizes and shapes the most comfortable gripping position as well as the capability of shifting from position to position to provide relief from laboring at one hand grip position.
The objective of the invention is attained by providing a vertical post mounted to the bed frame, the vertical post having a free upper end. To the free upper end a generally triangular gripping element is integrally mounted, the length of the three sides of the triangular gripping element being such as to provide room for even quite large size hands to grip around any of the three sides and the corners are rounded. Thus, the mother can grip all around the perimeter of the triangular element and can grip the post as well. The triangular element provides, for gripping, three major bars at differing angular positions and the post provides even a fourth bar.
For maximum effectiveness, the post and gripping element project perpendicularly from the frame into a position of prominence. There, the gripping surfaces are easily reached and gripped by the mother. It is a further important feature of the present invention to provide for pivoting the post totally out of the way under the bedframe so that when not needed it does not obstruct other operations of the birthing procedure.